Everyone Should Be Interested

I was asked recently why I was so interested in Ron Paul and why politics was important to me. At first I was baffled. I didn't get how someone wouldn't intuitively understand that. From my point of view, everyone should be interested in politics because these people we elect and their actions have major impacts on our quality of life.

But then it made me think. I guess I could just sit back and live my life like a good little tax-paying citizen. I could just ignore the government interventions on mine and my neighbors' lives, pretend that it's not a big deal.

Sometimes I wish I lived 150 years ago when people were in control of their own lives and their own prosperity.

There's the story of the frog that is put into boiling water and quickly jumps out. But if you put that same frog into room temperature water and slowly bring it to a boil, it will die because it won't realize the slow change.

Our government has slowly been boiling us for the past 150 years, and I think it's important to put a stop to it. This might sound a bit "conspiracy theory" to the average person, but a little research will show that it's very accurate. Here are a few examples:

- Paper dollars used to be receipts for gold in deposit. Every dollar was backed by gold and silver, and were redeemable for those items. But because gold and silver are heavy to carry and use in transactions, we used dollars instead and the heavy metals would just be stored. Now, our money is backed by nothing. We are now led to believe that the receipts themselves, the dollars, are money and have value.

- The Federal Reserve, the organization that prints our money, is not a government agency. They are a private bank. Instead of Congress printing the money themselves (which they have the constitutional authority to do), they instead created the Federal Reserve to print the money. Congress borrows the money from them, and we pay interest every year -- Interest that we wouldn't have to pay if Congress printed the money instead of borrowing it. Coincidentally, the money the IRS collects from the personal Federal Income Tax is very close to exactly the amount we pay every year in interest. So not one penny of our income taxes actually pays for government services.

- The US Constitution is basically a handbook for how the government is to operate. It explicitly lists the things that Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court are allowed and obligated to do. If it's not there, they aren't authorized to do it. So now, look in the US Constitution and try and find where it says that the federal government is allowed to regulate education, be involved in healthcare, welfare, foreign aid, make laws that regulate the internet, or any number of other things that the government believes they have a right to do.

You may be a socialist and think the government should take care of us from cradle to grave, or you may be a libertarian and think government should have almost no role in our lives. But either way, you can't deny that the federal government has to obey the laws (the Constitution) the people and states have laid out for them. A government that oversteps its bounds needs to be put back in check, otherwise it will fall into tyranny. This should be a primary concern of all people. Not just those that have a "passing interest in politics."
CommentsAdd Comment